The Silver AI Project

"We live in the most interesting of times." Elon Musk 23 Feb 2024
"At some point, maybe in the next 5 to 10 years, these systems will be able to set their own goals." Eric Schmidt 14 Jan 2024
"This is the most interesting year in human history, except for all future years." Sam Altman 17 March 2024

This website is the home for a short FREE AI course (go straight to Session 1 - Making AI Images) that introduces AI as a practical tool that can be used in everyday life and also do far more. It is completely non-technical but will guide you to use AI tools confidently.

Robots dancing

Course outline: An introduction to using AI to aid creativity and to help solve life's problems.

This is a set of six one hour sessions usually delivered face to face to small groups (12 to 15 people). It is entirely non-technical and is suitable for anybody who wants to grasp the potential benefits brought by AI.

Attendees should be able to access some AI tools during the course using simple devices like iPads and laptop computers. The intention is that students who become Graduates of the Silver AI Project continue to use AI in their everyday life afterwards and that many will continue to meet in AI related groups.

Introduction to AI Course 2024

Social media site X (Twitter). During the course students will interact with the AI built into X (Grok). X is also an easy way for students to share images and more that they create. Furthermore, X is perhaps the best place to follow this fast moving subject. It is recommended (but optional - we know that X is like Marmite, some of you hate it!) that students create a (free) X account and then follow the Silver AI Project: @silverAIproject.

Things to do before course starts. Please read and act on the points here: Notes on Pre-course Preparation. It will save you time during the sessions and maximise the value you get from the course.

Frequently asked questions about Artificial Intelligence. It is worth reading through these non-technical FAQs about AI before starting into the course.

Session 1. Making beautiful AI images
We start with the production of art because it most clearly demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence and allows easy introduction of some general principles. We look at the Midjourney and DreamStudio tools. Here is information on additional AI Art tools.

Session 2. Examples of where AI chat is used
When artificial intelligence is given the ability to manipulate text it can do remarkable things. Here we provide a rapid overview of its capability, and talk about chatbots and language models.

Session 3. Advanced image creation and AI video
It is easy to obtain lovely images from AI. It becomes harder when you wish to have exactly the content arranged just as you would like. Also advanced prompting! This session further extends to 'text to video' tools that threaten traditional movie studios.

Session 4. Writing with the help of AI
Starting with how AI can help with fiction writing. Also seeing where AI already has the ability to strengthen more formal writing for even simple things like polite email responses. Let AI show you how to turn down that party invitation without causing offence.

Session 5. Humanoid robots and their implications
How Tesla cars and 'self driving' shows the concept of 'video in, actions out'. Extension to training of humanoid robots and their applications. Humanoids in everyday life and in senior care.

Session 6. AI ethics and our future with AI
The world three years from now. Helping family survive AI, particularly those still in education. AI ethics and AI rights. Longevity. The singularity. A little AI music.

You may run this course! The most valuable thing you can do is to help spread these skills further. The right to use and modify the materials on this website to present AI courses is freely granted to all (worldwide). The course was created and is maintained by local David McAll to support the U3A in the small English country town Chipping Sodbury but the content is universal and can be delivered by any enthusiast anywhere in the world.


Additional information

[a] Diffusion Method: about the 'Diffusion Method' used by AI Art tools
[b] Neural Networks: about 'Neural Networks'



Additional notes on AI tools from AI course

[a] Midjourney: about Midjourney AI
[b] DreamStudio: about DreamStudio
[c] Google Gemini: about Google Gemini
NOTE. Google Gemini images currently paused (Feb 2024)
It is worth reading the Google blogpost on their Gemini image problem 2024 and pause "We recently made the decision to pause Gemini’s image generation of people while we work on improving the accuracy of its responses. Here is more about how this happened and what we’re doing to fix it." 23rd Feb 2024
[d] OpenAI:
[e] Anthropic Claude family: getting Claude AI for chat and more
Claude 3 has three versions. Opus is the best. Sonnet is very good and FREE to use.

We are still deciding whether to include others, for example:
(and yes, we know that they all do more than this brief description)
- Freepik.com/pikaso for text to images
- www.story.com for text to movie!
- Sora for text to video
- Pika Labs for Lip Sync
- Leonardo Image2Motion
- Suno Ai for text to music www.suno.ai
- Grok on X (Twitter) grok.x.ai
[not to be confused with Groq, a chip for running AI models extremely quickly]
- Nvidia's Chat with RTX (AI chatbot runs locally on your PC)
- RunwayML for video and more
- Perplexity
- Magnific AI Magnific.ai for image Upscaler, Enhancer & Transformer



Advanced tools:
Stable Diffusion
Hugging Face



Cool AI applications:
DoNotPay
Amazon Rufus chatbot

Interesting blogs:
Don't Worry About The Vase thezvi.substack.com

Best writers on practical use of AI:
Ethan Mollick (@emollick on X)

Futurists:
Max Tegmark (@tegmark on X) and blog
- author of "Life 3.0 Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"

Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Library
- author (book) of "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology - 2006"
- author (book) of "The Singularity is Nearer" (published soon)

Scott Aaronson Scott Aaronson's blog
article: The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI and other discussions.

Geoffrey Hinton (@geoffreyhinton on X)
A founder of deep learning. Apparently born in Wimbledon, London (this website is proudly British).

Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele on X)
Predicted the end of keyboards screens etc for a 'voice first' future many many years ago.
Also one of the most entertaining people to follow on X, helped by his 'intelligence amplifier'.

Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson on X)
- anti-ageing, 'Don't Die'



Advanced courses:
Google's Cloud Skills Boost
Microsoft's Generative AI for Everyone
Microsoft's AI for Beginners
Harvard's Introduction to AI with Python